Brits in Berlin: John

Name: John Dennehy

Age: 44

City of origin: Cork (Ireland)

zartis – Irish IT recruitment services, now made in Berlin

We’ve been looking at expanding our IT recruitment services into Berlin for two years. We’ve now made the decision to setup a permanent office over there and make the city home to four Zartis.com employees.

Here’s why we picked Berlin as our third European office:

The tech sector is booming

Some of Europe’s most exciting startups and scale ups are located there. AskCharlie and Zalando are two great examples. There’s also a huge amount of venture capital flowing into the city’s tech companies which will help nurture the growth of some of European’s best success stories of the future.

Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, (c) zartis

The city welcomes migrants

With all the talk of building walls and Brexit it’s hugely refreshing to be in a place that genuinely recognises the need to attract and welcome tech talent. Visiting one of our clients in the city I met an engineering team of ten where only two were German. The other’s came from Brazil, Scotland, The Philippines, Spain and Portugal.

English is widely spoken

In fact in many of the tech companies English is the main language. You can live happily day to day in Berlin with little to no German. While learning German is obviously recommended it’s possible for somebody to move to Berlin and successfully build a career there speaking only English.

There’s a great community

The tech community is tightly-built around small areas of the city and even smaller groups of people. I’m an outsider looking in so kudos to Connor Murphy for insights in this regard. People are friendly and plenty of Europe’s best designers and engineers already call Berlin their home.

Berlin courtyard

It’s still relatively cheap

Locals complain about the rising cost of rent. This is a grumble heard in all the world’s best cities. However, Berlin is still cheap in comparison to London, New York and other major European hubs.

It’s a beautiful city to live in

There’s a unique vibrancy to the city and it feels like a very safe place even at night.

There’s a unique vibrancy to the city and it feels like a very safe place even at night.

We’re opening in Berlin so that we can offer more options to the software developers we work with. The vast majority of candidates we work with are highly skilled software developers moving to a new city. We can now provide additional opportunities for career growth in Berlin as well as Dublin and Madrid.